The Sickest Thing You Can Do With a Death Note
by Sashocirrione
Summary: Some bullies target Light, completely unaware that he is, in fact, Kira. No pairings.


**Title: **"The Sickest Thing You Can Do With a Death Note"

**Author: **Sashocirrione

**Spoilers: **Spoilers for the first three or so episodes.

**Warnings: **Rated T for violence.

**Summary: **Some bullies target Light, completely unaware that he is, in fact, Kira.

**Pairings: **None.

**Additional Notes: **All canon events previous to this have occurred as normal.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Death Note, and I do not make any money from these writings.

* * *

It happened on the way home from cram school. Light knew their names. He had even considered writing one in his death note before. Makato Sudou, the leader of the bullies.

But it was stupid to kill people close to you, no matter how much they deserved it. Light knew that. If the police or L ever got close, evidence like that would be entirely too suspicious.

So, when the cackling bullies surrounded Light, he tried to unobtrusively push past them. They would never know how lucky they were to be close to Kira. A brief thought flickered through Light's mind. If he had actually wanted to, if he didn't care about the consequences, he could kill them right here and now. The false bottom for his desk drawer wasn't quite done yet, so for safety's sake he had the death note with him at all times. It was now buried in the depths of his backpack.

But Light's attempt to push through was unsuccessful; the bullies wouldn't let him past. They just reclosed the circle around him and kept giggling.

In a quiet, dangerous voice, Light said, "What do you want?"

Sudou replied, "Ryochin says you talk to yourself, just like a kid with an imaginary friend. Is the pressure getting to you? Maybe you're starting to snap under the pressure of always making the rest of us look stupid!"

Ryuk chuckled and said, "I guess you weren't careful enough, Light."

As the rest of the bullies snickered along with Ryuk, Light felt distinctly overwhelmed, as if all of them, even Ryuk, were conspiring together against him. And, even worse, a classmate had overheard him talking to Ryuk. It wouldn't prove anything, even if L did hear of it, but it wasn't good.

Light waited, trying to look neutral and hoping their anger would dissipate after they forced him to stand on a darkened street corner for long enough. That's all these guys wanted, to create inconvenience. There were too many of them to fight. Running was a possibility, if the circle could be broken, but it was best not to start any physical violence, even the slight violence of forcing through the circle. They would probably get tired and leave.

Suddenly, Light felt a sharp pain on his head as one of those bullies behind him, where he couldn't see, hit him. Before he knew it he was wobbling and then falling, his chin hitting the concrete sidewalk with a crunch and then he could feel blood running down his face. He blinked uncertainly, his vision blurry, his head spinning.

Then he heard Ryuk's voice, saying, "Hey, Light, they're getting into your backpack."

Light desperately tried to sit up, failed, then tried again and succeeded. Oh, shit, so many books and notebooks were coming out of the bag, being passed around the circle.

Light said, "You want money? I'll pay if you stop."

It didn't stop. They ignored him. Light made a lunge at one as he saw the death note coming out, but he just managed to weakly clamp the guy's legs. All of them, all would need to die. But first...

Light looked straight at Ryuk, standing behind the one who was holding the death note, and said, "Get out of here!"

Ryuk grinned and phased through a wall into a building.

Light said, "I'm serious. Just give my books and notebooks back, and I'll pay you. I'll make it worthwhile."

Sudou said, "You'll pay us, all right. You'll pay by getting your schoolwork disrupted for once. We can get money from anyone."

Sudou ripped the cover off a textbook and said, "I want to see the teacher yelling at you. If you get a perfect score on tomorrow's test, something worse than tonight will happen."

The bullies around the circle followed Sudou's example, ripping covers off of whatever textbooks or notebooks they held, flinging those items to the ground, and then walking away chuckling. Light watched them until they were out of sight, and then went immediately to his death note. Both covers had been ripped off.

Probably none of those guys understood English, so they wouldn't realize what the death note said, and they weren't looking closely at what they were destroying, and anyway it was dark. So, they wouldn't need to die immediately to shut them up. There was time to think of how they would die. But their names would need to be written down before they saw Ryuk, either to actually kill them before they saw Ryuk, or to control them into not saying anything about seeing Ryuk and then to die afterward.

Ryuk slid out of the wall and stood over Light, looking at the death note.

Ryuk said, "That's a problem."

"What?"

"Well, you can tear as many pages out of a death note as you want and it doesn't matter, but the power comes from the cover. When the cover gets damaged, malfunctions can happen."

Light said, "Can't I just repair it?"

Ryuk said, "I mean it malfunctions after you repair it. Until you fasten those covers back on, it won't work at all."

Light gritted his teeth and stood up, still feeling a little woozy. This was bad, an unneeded complication. Those bullies needed to be taken care of right away, before they would get a chance to see Ryuk.

Well, there was a way around this. Repair the death note as well as was possible, using a professional book repair kit, and stay home "sick" a few days while killing a lot of victims to test out the death note and figure out the exact extent of the malfunctions. Once those were fully known, it would be safe to kill the bullies. Just work around the malfunctions, whatever they turned out to be.

Luckily, Light already had a book repair kit at home, so the only thing left to do was fool his mother into thinking he was sick. That would be easy. The stupid idiot always believed whatever her perfect son told her. Light carefully put his death note and its torn covers in the bottom of his backpack, then loaded up the other books and notebooks. Those would need to repaired too, to hide the attack by bullies. If word got out that the bullies who died had attacked him first, that would be bad.

When Light got home, he spent a couple of hours using his book repair kit to re-attach the death note's covers, working meticulously and precisely. He hoped that the better a job he did the fewer malfunctions there would be. Then he let the glue dry overnight so it would be perfect. Indeed, the next morning it looked perfect, almost like it had never been ripped, and Light's mother believed he was feeling awful enough to stay home from school without him even needing to fake symptoms. All he had to do was stay in bed and say he didn't feel very good. She didn't even ask about the bloody scrape on his chin.

As soon as she withdrew, Light locked the door to his room and went to work writing down names. He made sure to pick people he would be able to get the results from soon, and he tried all sorts of combinations of things, ordinary default heart failure deaths, heart failure deaths with times attached, outlandish controlled deaths, rather ordinary controlled deaths, and many different causes of death, accidents, illness, everything.

Of course, only the heart attack ones would be noticed by L and the police and thus show up on NPA computers as Kira-related deaths, but Light made sure the other names he wrote down were in positions where he should certainly hear exactly what had happened to them, whatever it was.

By the end of the day, Light was getting the information and it didn't look good. No, it didn't look good at all. He kept hoping for a report that differed from the others, but nothing did. The death note was almost useless. Everything was exactly the same.

Light yelled in frustration and pounded his fists on the desk.

Ryuk said, "I take it you aren't pleased."

"Of course I'm not pleased," Light said, "there's only one result no matter what I write. There are no more times of death, no more causes of death, no more controlled actions. What can I do with this? The people don't even die!"

"Well," Ryuk said, "you can make them suffer. I mean, a heart attack that they always survive followed by really awful flu is a way to punish criminals, isn't it?"

"Ryuk," Light quietly said, in a low dangerous voice, "I want to kill them. This isn't a death note any more, it's a sick note. I don't want a sick note! I don't want to go back to school and have you get spotted either."

Ryuk said, "Then, do you want to give up ownership?"

"No."

Light began laughing then, a sick, crazy laugh that spilled out of his mouth in little spurts and gasps.

"I will," Light said, "make them suffer, with the most painful heart attacks and the most horrible flu. Those criminals will know they have been judged by the god of the new world."

"What about the guys who ripped your death note?"

Light said, "Oh, since I can't kill them and probably only one or two are able to see you, I'll just pay you extra apples to not mention my secrets around them and to act like a scary hallucination. If they start ignoring you, just pinch them so they know you're real."

"Sounds like a lot of fun," Ryuk said.

Three days later, headlines on all the newspapers were saying things like, "Kira is Replaced by Sicko" and "Endless Flu for Criminals."

* * *

**A/N (Author's Note):**

Yeah, I know, this fic doesn't live up to its title, but that's kind of the point.

This is written according to a prompt for the death note fan fiction contest on livejournal.

And, yes, it is complete. I'm not interested in writing out a big battle between L and Sicko, and I think you can imagine that when deprived of most of his powers, Light would know to keep a low profile and then perhaps L would never have gotten close to him (since in canon Light's bold actions in flaunting his power and purposely drawing L in were the only reasons L was able to zero in on Light as a prime suspect so quickly).

Mostly, the bully and classmate names are based on the names of extremely minor canon characters that really do go to class with Light, but I had to add a bit.


End file.
